Episode 2: Sociologists, Surveys, & Scientists feat. Dr. David Macaluso

The host discusses the topic of scientific communication and the gap between scientists and the general public. She mentions the work of sociologist Dr. Massimiliano Bucchi, who focuses on scientific communication and the public's attitudes towards the scientific community. The host questions why scientists rely on the media to communicate their work instead of learning how to effectively communicate with the public themselves. She also discusses the challenges of translating scientific information for non-experts and the need for scientists to bridge the gap and communicate with the public directly. The host mentions her upcoming interview with Dr. David Macaluso, who has experience teaching courses on scientific communication. Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to Storytelling Science. I'm your host, Sydney Burson, and unfortunately today Haley could not join me, so it's just me in studio today. So I hope everybody is doing well, and let's get right into it. So last time we left off discussing some historical ethics cases where Haley and I made the insertion that maybe science hasn't exactly done its due diligence on earning the public's trust. So all of those were super interesting. We would love to talk about them further. Unfortunately, we just don't have the time. So moving right along, I want to get to today some of my own analysis of some sources that I found on scientific communication. I have an interviewee coming in to discuss those. So yeah, it's going to be a good episode, guys. So this section, I like to call it the breakdown scientific communication with the public. And in my search for sources, I found this fantastic author and sociologist named, and forgive me if I mispronounce this, I am so sorry, Massimiliano Bucchi. Okay, Dr. Bucchi has studied worldwide and is currently a professor at the University of Trento in Italy. He has numerous prestigious awards for his research, which I won't list all of them. However, you can find them on the Wikipedia page that I used to gather some more information about Dr. Bucchi. His central studies focus on scientific communication interactions with the public and the public's attitudes towards the scientific community. The book that I pulled from specifically was titled Science and the Media, Alternatives to Scientific Communication. And it was written in 1998. I'll primarily focus on the introduction portion of this book because I found it very interesting. The rest of the book, he talks about different case studies, highlighting some of that communication from the scientific community with the public. Unfortunately, I was not able to get very far into that. And so I just want to address the introduction and some of his main topics. So Bucchi says that science prides itself on its autonomy. And that autonomy forms from the widening of the knowledge gap between academia and the general public. This autonomy and distance we place between the scientists and the public is the wall that I mentioned earlier. Bucchi also asserts that this could be due to the highly specialized training that scientists receive now, which could make it more difficult to be discussed amongst the public. So with that being said, how does one go about bridging the gap between these specialists and the non-specialists? Most of the time, scientists use the media and rely on journalists to break down the case and break it down from this super dense, what I call the intra-specialist or inter-specialist works into some more bite size pieces for the public. However, this can introduce issues or as Dr. Bucchi states, quote, blame the messenger, unquote, attitudes from either side. So we can get blaming from the scientists that journalism or the media isn't doing their due diligence or isn't reading the sources correctly, or we have outcries from the public about how they don't understand what they're saying. So I'm sure as people who are multilingual, like myself, working as a translator is very difficult. So I understand journalism's job and I kind of want to get into that more interpreter side of things that journalism has going on. The inclusion of these interpreters poses a significant risk to mistranslation, which I just touched on. And this got me thinking, why do we, i.e. scientists, rely on the media as a buffer instead of spending more time in our early training, learning to communicate with the public? So why are we relying so heavily on the media and pressuring them as interpreters to interpret our own work when we ourselves are the specialists and the experts? We know what we are talking about because majority of the time we have spent years or even decades on this work. So why don't we spend more time in our early training, and early training I mean collegiate specialized training, on learning how to communicate with someone who is not so much a non-expert, but maybe someone who doesn't have a science background at all. So non-expert means something entirely different from what I call non-expert. Dr. Buki uses an example from another author, but it's what he calls intra-specialist and inter-specialist, which I touched on earlier. The former describes an expert who understands the particular focus of the presentation and everything that has to do with that particular focus of the project. Whereas the latter, the inter-specialist, represents an expert in the same field as the topic, but maybe doesn't know everything that has to do with that particular focus. So this is what I mean when I talk about non-expert, is we're usually referring to someone who maybe has a background in the field in which we're presenting in, but maybe doesn't understand or know all of the finite details about the particular topic that we're going to be presenting on. So we tailor a lot of our training to these people, these inter-specialists. So I would consider myself an intra-specialist on, oh gosh, I'm trying to think of maybe a chemistry topic. Let's say like pH testing with a glass electrode. I could consider myself an intra-specialist. Now I could be presenting all of my findings to other chemists, to other scientists who have a chemistry background, and they would be considered inter-specialists. And those are the people that we tailor our presentations for, because most of the time those are who we're going to be presenting in front of, and so we want to get a lot of practice on how to be professional and give maybe a more serious discussion. So that's what I mean by non-expert. We're just saying non-expert in this specific topic. However, we, in my personal experience, we don't get a whole lot of training on how to present to people who don't have a science background, the general public. Maybe someone who has no idea what I mean by a pH. So how, since we don't receive any training on that, how are we supposed to effectively communicate with the public? And I think that's where that gave rise into that reliance on journalism and the media, because they understand the general public, or sorry, the public, very intimately. That's the audience in which they're writing for, and so I would consider them an expert as well. But we're all human. We're not perfect. There are going to be some quote-unquote mistranslations of our subject matter, and so how do we, as scientists, help bridge that gap, help take that responsibility towards fixing that? Yeah, so we mainly cater to those experts in our field in presentations, which again, is extremely valuable, but how do we present our research to the public in an unpretentious and thorough way? And that's just as valuable and necessary as being able to present in front of our colleagues. So I am going to pursue this a lot further in the next section. I have Dr. David Macaluso coming in for an interview, and Dr. Macaluso has taught one of the classes on campus that is physics and literacy and communication, which I believe is a graduate-level class. I am not sure. I will ask him when he gets here. But he and I are going to kind of dissect Dr. Buki's book, talk about Dr. Macaluso's experiences, and really kind of get to the root of the problem. And after that, I'm hoping that I receive some more data on my survey. I'm hopeful. But as of right now, I have still only had five responses. But we can still talk about that. All right. Welcome back to Storytelling Science. I'm your host, Sydney Burson. And today I am joined with the fabulous Dr. David Macaluso. Yes, you are fabulous. Dr. Macaluso is a former professor of mine, and I invited him here today to cover some questions, talk about scientific communication. He's had some experience teaching a couple courses on campus about that. So we previously talked about one of the books by Massimiliano Buki. I think I'm pronouncing that correctly, but my Italian is not so good. And I've not read that book. I've just read the quotes you've shown me. Right, exactly. So we kind of broke it down in the previous section that I recorded. And then we're just going to kind of go into a bit more depth with your expertise. Excellent. All right. So do you want to introduce yourself? Did I cover anything? Oh, that was an excellent introduction. I don't know if I would have put fabulous in there. I do teach the communicating physics course, which is the technical writing course, which is all about communicating science. So that's my expertise in the field, and I have been teaching science for 25 years now. That's a long time. It is a long time. Lots of experience. And at various levels, which I think helps. And it does help. I think I was reading on your bio on U.M. that you taught middle school, secondary? Middle school, then high school, and then as a TA for undergrads, and then all the way through graduate school. I'm now here teaching undergraduates and graduates at U.M. And soon to be chairman? Soon to be chairman. Soon to be chairman of the physics department. Yeah. Actually, I have, what, six more months of freedom, and then I'm chained to the chair. Oh, no. You love it. Don't lie. I've never done it. I'm not looking forward to the extra responsibility, but I think it's something that we all should do. It's part of academia. It's true. Yeah. Well, and it's a big honor for you as well, right? I get to say that I'm the chair, which people outside of the field think is impressive, but from inside the field, people go, oh, I'm sorry. Well, I think it's cool. That's the way it works. Right. All right. Whoa. So it's an honor being chair? Yes. Yes. It is an honor being chair. All right. First question. In your experience, what are some of the main barriers that students come up against that hinder their understanding of science? How is this similar or different across various age groups you've taught? So, and you mean specifically in the classroom? Specifically in the classroom in, well, science, basically. I think so much of science is problem solving. And if you have students who are there to learn science and problem solving at the same time, the problem is that they can't solve problems, and that gets in the way of learning science. And so they can't reason their way through scientific problems. They are really challenged at learning the science itself. And I see that in the classes. The students who are inherently skilled at problem solving absorb the science very well, the concepts, which is separate from the problem solving. The students who come in without that same problem solving background really struggle to learn the science because they can't, and it's a hard thing to try to quantify, but they cannot reason their way through the problems, which allows them to better understand the topic. So it's almost like, you know, trying to put the cart in front of the horse is trying to teach science without problem solving, and it doesn't work so well. So that's what I've seen in every level. You know, it doesn't matter what level you're at. If I'm teaching middle schoolers, I have the same problem as if I'm teaching graduate students in material science, where at that level, those who have the skills for problem solving excel at absorbing the science itself. Gotcha. Okay. That's a great answer. Like, digesting all of that. Yeah, problem solving. Yeah, I know we talked about it in our physics class. That was something that you presented to us right away, was that the main reason why all of the science STEM majors on campus needed to take that class was because it taught you that problem solving skill and that you might not be able to, you know, it won't be like a cookie cutter question that you get from an exam, but I want to teach you how to solve the problem, because when you go into real life and you go into those careers that you're planning on going into, you need to be able to problem solve your way through it. I can't think of any other word. Yeah, and it's not even, you know, it's not even the process of teaching problem solving, because problem solving isn't something you learn how to do. It's like lifting weights or something. The more you do something, the better you are at it. You know, so that's what I'm trying to do is get people better at it, you know, just to hone that skill. And the more skilled they are at that, the more they understand the scientific method, they understand data, they understand analysis and the communication of all of those things. So it's really, if you have a mind that can do that, you are going to absorb science, which makes conveying science to the general public so challenging. Yeah, I can understand that. I guess we can move on to the next question. In your opinion, what does collegiate scientific education do well in preparing students to communicate their research? And what are some things that they don't do well that could be improved upon? So, really, in that case, it's what do they do well, it is doing the research they do well. And at this point, it's really sort of a newly developing field to have the communication of the science and be its own field, because it's, and it really comes down to who your audience is with communication, like we learn how to communicate science to scientists, you know, and it's a very different technique than communicating science to the general public, or even to students. Communicating to scientists is a very dry, very complicated process. I think like when I was talking about it and presenting it further, it's that intra-specialist, inter-specialist, and then the public. Exactly. And so we kind of cater more towards that intra-specialist, inter-specialist, and that's what we're trained on. And we don't get much training on how to communicate our research to the public. Correct. Yeah. And that's, I think that's a new thing. You know, the communicating physics class I have, we devote almost all of our energy to communicating to the public, the general audience, or to people who are technically proficient, but are not in our field, which means they really don't know any of the information, you know, inherently that we're talking about. So that's a totally different challenge than as an atomic physicist, I'm going to write a paper for other atomic physicists. Right. So I get trained really well at that. Academia does a great job. Collegiate research does a great job for that and does a terrible job of, okay, how are you going to communicate this to the general public or even to students? You know, we have a broad field science degree or concentration in physics, and that is specifically about communicating science to students, but those are the only students that get that training. None of the others get that training because everybody's so siloed in their subject matter. Right. Exactly. And that was something that I just observed, which is why I started this project to begin with, was noticing that difference between, okay, well, I know how to communicate with my peers really well. I know how to talk to you really well about the things that I'm learning, but talking to, let's say, my parents, who have no science background whatsoever, they just kind of go, I have no idea what you're talking about, but sounds cool. And that's the challenge, really. People say, oh, I'm going to dumb it down for someone. That's not at all what it is, but you have to give those people a foundation to understand what you're talking about. That's not dumbing it down. It's here are the basics. This is the idea. This is why we're studying what we're studying, and this is what we are using what we are learning for. And that's not dumbing it down at all, but that's completely different than I'm going to convey some energy levels I found in some ion that's being studied in some nebula. Totally different. True. Exactly. And I think sometimes it can be perceived as maybe being pretentious or the phrase dumbing it down. Personally, I find that phrase a little bit problematic because that's assuming that the other person is dumber than you, which is not true. I've just had more training than they have on something. And so, like you said, explaining the foundational, I spoke to Kent Thugden about this, and he was telling me that when I look at a basic chemistry problem, I'm pulling from way far back on how to solve that problem. I know what quantitative analysis is. I know what all of these particles mean, whereas someone who doesn't have any of that background knowledge, they look at this and go, this is an entirely different language. So it's certainly a challenge in communicating with the general public. Yeah, it's two different languages. Exactly. So going back to that question, some of the things that they could do well is maybe providing that training on how to communicate with the public at the collegiate level. I certainly think that's important. For example, here at UM, we have technical writing and communication courses, but they are outside of our scientific fields. Now, we in our department have this communicating physics course, but it's so unique compared to what other departments have, where we specifically are, okay, how are we going to communicate to students, the general public? How do you talk to your grandfather at Thanksgiving to explain to him about the fact that the earth is round and not flat? These are the things we have to learn how to do as scientists. It's an obligation we have, the training and the time and the effort and the understanding that we have of the natural world. We have to figure out how to communicate that to the layperson, because the layperson is going to believe whatever source of information they prefer to believe, which is another challenge entirely. Absolutely. Anything else to add to that question at all? No, I think if every scientific, particularly the physical sciences, because the social sciences, I think, do a much better job of this. Things like communication and the understanding of ideas across different disciplines, I think, is handled better. I could be wrong. I'm not a social scientist, but from those that I know, it is a much greater emphasis. The emphasis in the physical sciences is almost the exact opposite. You are only going to be communicating with that very small group of people that know what you're talking about already. It's the exact opposite of how we should be teaching communication to anyone but those very few people. I'm glad we have that course in our curriculum. I would love to see it everywhere. It should be a universal, really. It should be part of scientific curriculum as, okay, how do I communicate really, really extraordinarily complicated ideas to people who are coming in with exactly zero understanding of the foundations of any of it? Exactly. I know in my courses, we called it non-expert when it was really just the inter-specialists. They have background in science. They probably have background in that field, but maybe they don't have a background or an understanding of the specific topic that you're presenting on. That is our non-expert that we're catering towards. I personally don't have any training that I can think of on how to communicate with the general public, which is a little bit concerning to me. I would like to be able to talk to other people about what I do because I think it's cool. You should have taken communicating physics. I should have. I should have. We're down to the last week of the semester. Otherwise, I would have. I think seeing that included in other scientific departments would be great. I think all of them should have it. All of them should have their own technical communication class. I fully agree because then we can move away from the reliance on perhaps the media or journalism or other social scientists to communicate that to the public for us and be like, okay, we can present it ourselves is what I'm trying to get at. We need more Neil DeGrasse Tyson's is what we need. People who are exceptionally competent in their field and yet really gifted at communicating to the general public. Right. Exactly. I think Haley and I talked about him as well. That was brought up on exactly your point. We need to have more of that. We can have more of that if we just train to do better at this. Right. We have to take that responsibility upon ourselves. Which is why I'm teaching the course. Exactly. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Hear it. Well, it's one of those things where we can we can talk about how much we need to improve, but if we're not actually going out and doing it, then our words don't mean very much. Agree. Okay. Question three. What are your thoughts on the opinion of this passage written by Matthew Bootke? The quote is, today, researchers place considerable importance on their autonomy and distance from the general public and to the existence of a general agreement within society concerning who can be deemed a specialist and what really counts as scientific knowledge. Bit of a mouthful. Yeah. The challenge in that, so 200, 300 years ago, you would have a scientist who was basically a craftsperson, let's say, you know, someone like a Galileo, you know, someone who's a glassblower or something and then is studying the natural world. That's completely different than today. Today, everything is so technologically advanced and our understanding of the world has become so complicated that all of us have such narrow specialties that it's impossible to not silo scientists in these tiny, narrow, and spectacularly deep specialties, which then alienate them from the public. I can't tell you how many times I've been at a dinner party or Christmas party and someone comes up to me and says, oh, I read this about this or that and I want to ask you about it, you know, something about relativity or quantum mechanics. And I can't even really begin to have the conversation with that person because it's like, well, you know, how are we going to talk about Hermitian space and infinite variables? You know, I can't in any kind of a meaningful way. And that's just because my depth of training makes it so challenging. So, you know, there's so much to unpack in what he's talking about there. The idea that we have separated out, like, you know, scientists need autonomy, that is a separate idea from who we decide are experts in a field. You know, as the specializations get more special, we inherently end up isolating those people who are experts. And unfortunately, if they are so isolated that they can't communicate the ideas that they are learning about or understanding, then their expertise is for naught. And a great example is something like climate science that, you know, we have so many scientists who are doing so much great work on the climate, but it is so complicated and so challenging to explain that it's very easy for someone to just dismiss it out of hand. And that person doesn't know the science that's dismissing it out of hand. And it's very challenging to get them to know the science. It's very challenging to counter arguments that question the science without going through all of the same training. So it's an inherent problem we have now, which is the separation and this, these people are the experts. They're the only people who know what they're talking about. Sometimes that's just actually factually true. And other times it isn't, which is challenging to figure out the difference between the two. I mean, a lot of the times the people who are really good at it are the ones who aren't out there claiming to be really good at it because they are too busy doing the work and poorly communicating with people. Exactly. So I kind of talked about this towards the beginning of the podcast of we have this idea of, well, we know what we're talking about. So just trust us. Yeah. So how do we get around that idea? I think, you know, it's like, okay, if, and people bring up this analogy often, you know, you go to a medical doctor and the doctor says, you need to have, you know, your appendix out. It's burst. You don't go, well, I'm going to have my uncle do that. Who is a plumber because I trust him more than you that there's this implicit trust in the expertise of someone who is like a medical professional. And yet the implicit trust in the scientific community seems to be eroding because often the conclusions of science are at odds with people's financial interests or possibly their social interests and whatever that is. And those are valid interests to have, but when they are in tension against someone's personal interests, it's much easier to say, well, I just don't trust you. You're not an expert. That usually doesn't happen with medical experts. I mean, it does, you know, my wife is a nurse and she's, you know, talking about people, well, you should stop smoking because it's killing you. And the person says, well, I am not going to stop smoking, which is right there. It's implicitly ignoring expert advice because it's counter to what they want. But the problem with that is, is then the consequences of that choice are going to be negative and they won't accept responsibility for those consequences. They will say it's somebody else's fault. It's not my fault. So that happens in science where, you know, we have people who just, they don't respect the expertise of scientists because it is in tension or in conflict with what they want or what they believe already. And they don't have the training of scientists, the depth of knowledge of scientists. And again, I'm not denigrating, I'm not saying they're not smart. I'm just saying that it's much easier to dismiss scientists in that case, which means the more, the more siloed, the deeper and more complicated the knowledge, the easier it is to dismiss because the harder it is to convey. Right? Right. Exactly. So it's, it's, it's a challenge, you know, the more we understand, the more we learn about the natural world, the harder it is to convey that to the general public. So, I mean, it would take me a long time to convey to someone what I do, let alone here are my results and what they believe. I think it would take you a long time just to convey it to me. And you're a scientifically capable... And I'm a scientist, yeah. I just went to a conference, you know, I have a PhD in physics and I am a physics professor, you know, multiply published researcher. And, and I would listen to a talk and be like, well, I can follow the general idea of what you're talking about, but I really do not know what you were talking about. I don't know this, this field at all. And that's my own field. It's just a specialty that's outside of what I do. And that's how siloed we've become. Yeah. So it's a, it's, but it is, it's an unavoidable consequence of the more we are learning about the world, the more complicated the questions become, the more narrow we can ask as individuals and the more narrow we can learn. So that's what's happening. And it makes broad scientific knowledge and consensus with the general public that much. Gotcha. So we should... Well, that's like, that's very interesting because I think when I talked about the lack of trust, I kind of touched more on the ethics of science that has happened. So maybe some ethical cases where we haven't exactly earned the trust of the general public. Yeah. I mean, it's like that old quote, science is, you know, unethical. It's, it's terrible, except it's much better than everything else in human civilization for those things. It is the, you know, the most rigorous, the most peer reviewed. It is the thing that weeds out ethical problems better than anything. Is it perfect? Of course not. As long as there are humans involved and nothing is perfect. So people have their own personal goals and intentions and needs and wants and desires, and that pollutes the waters for some people. But science more than anything is the pursuit of truth in nature and the reality that is nature. Is it perfect? No. No, because there's humans involved and we are not perfect. So, and I don't think we claim to be either. So... No, but as scientists, we pursue the perfect in knowledge, I think is the best way to put it. Okay. The imperfect of people pursuing the perfect in knowledge. And sometimes people's motivations, their desires, their greed, their political ideal, ideology, whatever it is, pollutes the waters in those cases. But I think least in science compared to every other discipline. Very true. Very true. Okay. But those get publicized. Yeah. Grandly. Yeah. It's always the, what is it? The, oh, the more extremist views that scream the loudest and get the most published. Yeah. I mean, even going on these ideas that people have their preconceived notions, the idea is that vaccines cause autism is a very famous study. That was the foundation for that, that has been completely debunked. It was completely artificial. The person has, it was fraud essentially. But those ideas... People still believe that it is true. Someone opened that Pandora's box and it's amazing. So real science is published and people don't want to believe it because it's counter to what they already believe. Junk science comes out and people will not stop believing it. It's like, ugh. But that's part of our job to communicate to the general public. Yeah. I can understand why that can be frustrating. I mean, I've had personal frustrations with people just talking about the things that I'm studying and they don't believe me either. And I'm also young, so I probably don't handle it as gracefully as I could, but I can understand the frustration. It is. Yeah. So we kind of touched on this, but it's a continuation of question three. The author asserts three different things. So science has become too specialized for the general public, which we talked about earlier. Assertion two, there then must be a form of mediation or the middleman, which in other words, the media who can bridge the gap. And then assertion three is, it's the middleman's job to simplify the language for the public. Yeah. I mean, I disagree with assertion three. I think really it's the scientist's job to get the middleman up to speed in a way that the middleman can communicate to the general public, or the scientist can bypass the middleman entirely. But that's becoming so challenging without putting enormous amounts of effort into teaching scientists how to do that, like we talked about. At this level, I'm teaching undergrads how to do that. Right. That's different than a graduate student, who now a graduate student who's doing the real work of science. They are so deep in their silo and so deep in their specialty, and they are so focused on communicating their science to their small group of scientists that it's almost the exact opposite of what they're training so hard to do. So it becomes challenging, but we still have to do it. And there's plenty of really good science reporters out there and good sources of publicly consumable scientific information. But the problem is the public doesn't know the difference between good and bad in that case, and they'll take whatever agrees with their preconceived notions or supports their ideas about the world or politics or money or race or religion or whatever it is that motivates their ideas. So it's hard to get the public to learn about science if they don't exclusively traffic in reliable scientific information. And again, that becomes our responsibility and the middleman's responsibility to get them to understand what is and is not reliable scientific information. Well, that can be hard to find as well, just to find resources on it. And then you have the people who are naturally or who are distrusting of science already, and they're like, well, I don't want to go through the extra effort to understand this. I just, I don't believe you. I mean, I've had, I have several friends and these are college educated friends who, their conclusion is everybody lies. So I'm going to believe the people that say the things that I already believe because I trust them because I already believe this thing. And if they're saying it, then they must be telling the truth, which is this really interesting self-selecting idea of what is right and wrong. If I already believe it and someone else is saying it and supporting my belief, they must be the person I trust. And so often it's the opposite. It's, you have a preconceived notion that's utterly false, but if you are not open to listening to this other person's opinion, you're never going to change your opinion. And that's only getting worse. Yeah. Yeah. I have definitely noticed a difference in just family, friends, community members on that exact idea. And so I try just personally, because I know that that is a thing that happens. I try to meet as many diverse people as I can and talk to them about different things. And like, I might not agree with them, but just being able to talk and have a conversation with them about it, I learned things that I would have never thought about before. And maybe it either changes my opinion or I just feel more educated about it and I feel like I can understand the opposition, so to say. Yeah. That's something that you are in academia, you're a student, so you are inherently open to absorbing information and absorbing information from multiple sources. People who have been away from this or have never been in this, and I don't mean to say that they are any less intelligent or valuable, but they may not have that same training. So they are going to inherently want to believe what they already believe to be true and reject things they do not want to be true and avoid sources of information that challenge their preconceived notions. And that's really that middleman. If only we had honest middlemen and middlewomen doing that job, who have integrity and have the best interests of society, and even that's a loaded comment, the best interest of truth or reality, or I don't even know what you want to say, motivating them, then things would be much better. But that's just not the way it works. It's not the way that it works, unfortunately. Yeah, then you have the idea of bypassing the middleman and going straight to the general public. But again, we've siloed ourselves into what we're doing. And so it can be really difficult for us to bypass that middleman. I mean, that's the Neil deGrasse Tyson person. But again, who seeks out Neil deGrasse Tyson is who's his target audience is going to be people that already buy what he's selling, right? Even though he's selling scientific reality, people already believe in that are the people who are going to go, Oh, Neil deGrasse Tyson is coming to town to give it to I'm going to go buy a ticket. I want to see that. But we want people who otherwise wouldn't be interested in that to hear it. And that's in all sciences. Yeah, right. Everywhere. And it's really hard to reach that population. Yeah. I mean, it's the classic quote, or quote, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Yeah, you can't even lead a horse to water, even if you tell them you need water. You're thirsty, you need water. Well, I don't believe you're a scientist and you're whatever. I can see like a comic artist, just like making that into like a comic section. Yeah. I mean, we saw that in real time with the pandemic where there was things like, this is absolutely proven to improve your chances of survival and people proudly not doing that. Well, it almost feels like maybe perhaps the medical field got a little bit of a taste of what we go through as just a scientific community. True. Because like I was saying earlier, in general, people don't question their medical doctor. I'm going to go to my cousin and have that person do my surgery. But that happened, right? That happened. And again, because science, the integrity of science is so high, science always adds these qualifiers because we're scientists. We think this is the best way to go. Oh, so you don't know. So why should I do it? Well, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence indicates this is the best thing to do, but we cannot say with 100% certainty that this is the best thing to do. Oh, therefore I shouldn't do it. Whoa. And that's that problem solving mentality that people don't have. They can't weigh the relative importance of various things. Every story has two sides. One of them might be 99.9% true and the other one might be 0.1% true. And yet there's two sides to every story and they're going to believe whatever fits. And that's across ideological spectrum. That's all the way to the left, all the way to the right. People want to believe what they already believe. They want to listen to people who are like-minded. And that becomes really challenging for science because science is, it's just the dry observation of facts and nature. And at its best, it has absolutely no opinions whatsoever. It is just data. We were presenting this data and it's so spectacularly challenging to get people to believe what the data is telling them, no matter how strongly, loudly and forcefully it's telling them that. Right. Well, and we present the data and we try to present it without bias. And sometimes the public or people outside of the field don't believe that we're presenting it without bias. Yeah, I agree. So that can make it very challenging. Yes, it can. I know. I'm thinking about how I'm going to be graduating soon and now I'm like, man, what did I get myself into? Yeah. Well, be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Doing a podcast, you're doing these mixed media things. That's a step in the right direction because it is not siloing yourself. Right. Well, and I'm trying to, the reason why I chose a podcast and I think I talked to you about this is I wanted it to be as accessible as possible. And with a podcast, there is a lot of people that listen to podcasts. It's one of their favorite forms of consuming media. And so I was like, well, if I can make this accessible, that's the point is kind of demystifying and letting people realize all of the things that we do and kind of taking the stance of educating it as well. But yeah, mixed media was something that I was very interested in and is the reason why I chose. Yeah, that's the power of podcasts is you can have so many different people come in and just speak candidly about the topic. Again, you have a self-selecting audience where someone's already interested in this topic. But that doesn't mean that you might not be teaching people. I listen to podcasts all the time and I learn things about subjects that I can't study in the depth and rigor that I study what I am an expert in. So it's like, oh, I'm going to listen to a podcast about AI because it means so much. And it's, I'm teaching a writing course. I really want to know about how it affects writing and how it can be useful, not necessarily just how is it dangerous or how can it be manipulated for ill intents, but how can it be used as a tool? How can we maximize its usefulness and make students better at what they are doing using it? And I need to learn that. So I've been listening to podcasts. And like speaking of AI, I was looking at a job just the other day where you would be working with AI just as a chemist, and you would be teaching the AI how to answer certain chemistry questions. And I was like, that is... So much of those are just data aggregators. You give it data so that it knows in the future, if I see this and this, I know that. That's the idea. But there are so many permutations and combinations of these things that exist. And there is the one place where AI really will struggle, which is science. And that's because it can't do the experiment, at least not yet. Right. Because we still need to take the data. We still need to do the experiments. We still need to do the observations. Now, AI, I think is going to become spectacular at helping to interpret the data, to tease out information from it. But it's really hard for AI to gather the data, to design the experiment. But that'll be a great thing, hopefully, in the future. Hopefully, yeah. AI, solve global warming, go. They'll be like, eliminate humans. Right. First thing we need to do. You're like, well, can't do that. What's the next best option? Don't solve global warming, which will eliminate humans. It's a self-solving problem. Oh, goodness. All right. Question five. So, pulling from your own expertise in teaching undergraduate advanced writing, what was your most extensive advice when they began their education on reading scientific material? That's an interesting one. And it's interesting because it's not typically something I talk about in class. We're usually going the other direction. It is, how do I get them to communicate their science to other people, not how do I make them better consumers of science, which is an interesting thing. But to address that question, what would I talk about in that case is the first and foremost is, what is the source of the information? You have to vet the sources for science. Once you've vetted the sources, if you are going down into something like, for example, I've had students who come in and they say they're interested in my research, they want to join my group. So, I give them a paper and they come back and they go, I have no idea what any of this is. I didn't understand any of the science. Can you please explain it to me? So, that's something that is part of being a scientific consumer is, okay, if I'm not up to speed to understand what this is, I'm going to have to do work to get myself up to speed to be able to understand it. So, vetting those sources, helping to get yourself to a place where you can actually absorb some of this science, because it can get so unbelievably complicated so quickly. The jargon can be so complicating. That itself becomes a barrier. And there are some fields that do that on purpose, as I understand it, that there's jargon that is used to isolate the public from the expertise, but that is very much not what's happening, at least in the field that I study and work in. The jargon sort of falls out of the fact that there's just so much information, things end up being acronymized, if that's a word. And so, it becomes, it's such a huge hurdle to get people to understand that as consumers of science. And I also think that students, there's nothing wrong with, like we have all these physics students in the department and they think reading a Scientific American article is, well, that's beneath me. I'm a physics student. I'm going to read a physics review letter, not a Scientific American article, or a Discover magazine article. It's like, no, consume science at all different styles and levels. Even science fiction, consume science fiction. You have to work yourself up to it. And it's a diversity. Everything in moderation, I guess. Right, exactly. But it's a diversity of styles, of sources, of complexity and expertise of sources, and always trying to vet sources because who knows what garbage you're going to get. That vaccine to cause autism. Yeah, that's right. Cannot undo that one. Right, exactly. I know I've had troubles with reading scientific papers and just kind of getting over that language hurdle. And a lot of times, well, just doing my presentation in modern physics, a lot of the stuff that I was talking about, I needed help with understanding. So I went to, what was that, Chemistry LibriTeX, and would just put in the phrase of that exact mechanism that I was studying into that so that I could break that down and be like, oh, okay, this is what they're talking about in this section. And now I understand why they're saying it's so important, why the research that they're doing is so important, because I have understood that one puzzle piece. Yeah, but then once you untangle that puzzle piece, you realize why the author used that phrase because the author can't put that entire puzzle piece in every time that idea is brought up, something like that. Just for brevity. Exactly. And again, the authors, hopefully if they're any good, if they are thinking of their target audience, knowing their target audience already knows what this means, this thing that you tripped over because you aren't their target audience. And so teaching scientists to be able to adapt to various target audiences is a big deal, but it's not at all in our interest as scientists to do so, at least not right now, because our job is to convey this incredibly complex information to people who essentially can already understand it, which is why you had trouble reading that paper. Right, exactly. It's like, I think in the book, he quotes another author, and they had a, oh shoot, they had like a diagram, and it was, again, that interspecialist, interspecialist, and it looks like a cornucopia. Yeah, I know, exactly. And it was like, you have this broad, like, you're just like, pushing all of the information out. And then you have to like, uh, oh my gosh, like funnel it down into the public. And like, you know, it shrinks as it goes down into the public. Yeah, then you end up with this incredibly concentrated drop of information that tastes terrible and no one understands it. Yeah, exactly. And then they go, nah, that can't be true. Yeah, it can't be true. That can't be true. Prove it. Oh, well, come back with me for the last 15 years to see all the information. Right. You should be like, can I just like, you know, like, Bluetooth my knowledge to you for like a second? Yeah, but that's the hurdle that we face. Yeah. And it feels like we're going backwards in this, that there was broad consensus of faith and expertise, that now there's almost a contempt for expertise, which is such a bizarre reaction. Yeah, I think, and this is just me like postulating, um, just like the feeling of elitism or being like, because you're an expert, you're automatically like pretentious or like you think that I am not intelligent enough to understand what you're talking about when that is not true at all. Like we would love to explain all of this to you. We just have to cover the foundation first. Yeah. Yeah. It's really getting public up to speed before you try to convey the information, but they want, they need to want that. The public needs to want to hear that. And that's your self-selecting your audience again, or at least your audience self-selecting themselves. They are the ones who are open to hearing that. And so you already have people who have an open mind and who want to learn about science. So it's getting people who have a closed mind, who don't want to learn about these things, getting them to care and realize that it matters and, and to put in the work. Yeah. Yeah. Putting in the work. I'm, I'm just excited to be part of the solution or hopefully part of the solution. I mean, it's amazing. I see the students who come through, I see all these really motivated, talented, smart, energetic people. It's like, yes, you're going in the right direction. Thank you. Exactly. Thank you. And you're not doing what you're doing because you want to get rich. That's just the way it is. You're doing it because you want to make a difference. You want to add that drop of knowledge to that, you know, see that is what we understand about the universe. So it's a great thing. Yeah. And it just, uh, speaking with my, my family and people ask me, you know, like, why do, why do you do it? It's like, well, I know what it feels like to struggle and I want to be part of I want to be part of that solution and help people who maybe are struggling, like how I did. And yeah, that's kind of like the basis of it is I want to be part of that solution. I want to be able to help other people because I think this stuff is very exciting and not being able to understand it just because of circumstances that are perhaps out of your control. Doesn't mean that you shouldn't understand it or shouldn't be able to pursue it. True. But that, that, that does become that person is still going to have to want to understand it. They're going to have to want to do at least some work to understand it. And that's the hard part is helping people who don't want to put in the work to understand it, help them understand it. That's a challenge. The more complicated it becomes, the more work it takes, the less likely it is to get this population of people to understand things. And again, I'm not singling out any specific population with that. It's the population of people who don't have scientific understanding and don't want it, you know, and yet want to voice in the debate about what is real and not. That's what's challenging. Mm-hmm. Well, thank you for joining me. That is all that I had for you. Um, yeah, that was really great. Fantastic. No, fabulous. Excuse me. It was fabulous. Absolutely. Alrighty, everyone. So in this next section of the podcast, we are going to talk about my survey and its purpose. So I gave out a survey across campus, just to the College of Humanities and Sciences, um, just to keep the pool a little bit smaller on scientific literacy and how perhaps the dense language of scientific papers can impede someone's understanding of the content. Um, and if there are certain barriers beyond their control that have impacted those. Um, so really studying all of the potential issues that someone could have when reading scientific papers, maybe how we mitigate that, just to kind of bring awareness. Um, because as Haley and I talked about earlier, sometimes these papers are not even expert friendly. Um, and I wanted to gauge how much training we get on being able to read these papers. Um, because ultimately, I mean, they are written for that inter-specialist, intra-specialist. Um, so if we are not being trained on how to understand them, how can we expect the general public or the media to be able to understand them as well? Um, so just kind of being able to bridge that gap. Um, so yeah, let's get into it. So unfortunately, I wasn't able to get very many responses. Um, so, so, but I still have enough that I can kind of analyze things. So, forgive me just pulling up a survey right now. All right. So firstly, I just wanted to start off with, um, the question of gauging what year in school people were, because a lot of times that can impact the familiarity that you have with scientific papers. So, it looks like the majority of the answers were seniors. Um, we had a couple graduates didn't, a junior, a junior, sophomore, but looks like majority of seniors are the ones who are taking this. And then, how frequently do you read scientific papers is the next question. And it seems like the majority of the answers were in a little, a few, and a lot. One person said a great deal, and one person said a moderate amount. So, kind of all across the board, but it looks like everybody here has some familiarity with reading scientific papers. Now, here's where the questions start to get really interesting. So, question four is, how do you feel about reading scientific papers and journals? And we had a bit of a split response. So, we had a split response between the language used makes it feel inaccessible. So, that's a big distinction. The language used makes me feel, or makes them feel, the papers themselves, feel inaccessible. Um, and then the other response was, I am confident and comfortable reading scientific papers and journals. So, we do have people that are more familiar, feel comfortable with reading the scientific papers, but then we also have a big enough majority where people feel like the papers are inaccessible to them. And I think that that might be a bit of a, it is what I expected. Um, just based off of personal experience, talking to my peers, I kind of gauged that might be the response. Um, but I still think that it's very interesting to talk about. So, let's get into the next, the next question. So, how accessible do you find the language of scientific literature, papers, and journals? Now, this question I wanted to really hone in on that attitude of just the language specifically. Not so much the journals themselves, but specifically the language. So, had another, uh, this one was actually more of a sweeping majority. Um, most people said that it was somewhat clear. So, maybe not unclear, maybe not very clear. But somewhere around the middle, um, which is generally pretty good for the dense materials themselves. All right, question six. Specifically for students, how much time have you received or are receiving on how to read scientific literature so that your understanding is maximized? So, this is where I wanted to gauge how much help people are getting from these experts who have experience in this dense language, have experience in that intra-specialist, inter-specialist. Um, and the two responses that I got were either none at all, or a little. And that is, it makes sense why we're seeing some of these responses of like, well, the language feels inaccessible to me. Okay, that makes sense. Um, or I feel comfortable reading them, but, um, maybe not super comfortable reading them. Um, or the language is not so clear. Um, it looks like just based off of the responses, people haven't really had very much training on how to get the most out of reading these scientific materials. Um, which to me is not so shocking. Um, I have like a personal experience in this. Um, and I don't know if I have received much training. The majority of it is teaching myself. Um, going to a dictionary to look up some of these words, or a lot of times these scientists will use shortened abbreviations. They will use, um, key terms that are specific just to this paper. And I find myself, I'll get about halfway through the paper, and then I'll stumble across the word and I'll go, I have seen this word before. I still don't know what it means. So I have to go back to the very beginning of the paper and try and find where they define that word. So it is, it is not an easy read. It is a very active read. Um, but that is something that I had to teach myself. So it wasn't training by a colleague or an expert. And, um, yeah, I think that these responses are pretty on par with what I thought. Okay. Question seven. Have you ever felt that the research article's difficulty and or your understanding of the material caused you to doubt your career choice? So this is playing into that inadequacy, inadequacy feeling that I pointed out at the very beginning of the podcast. Um, that feeling that we might not be qualified to do it. And I wanted to gauge how much this material can affect that. Majority of the time, after we read these papers, we go, man, I don't understand what's going on. Maybe, maybe I am not cut out for this. If I, if I don't understand this material of something that is within my field, well, then maybe I don't understand the field itself. And that's not always true. And looking at things, looking at this survey, not exactly set up for it. We're not, and this is a very, very small pool, very small pool, but perhaps because we're not receiving as much training as we could, maybe that's causing people to doubt that career choice. And just looking at the responses, um, I only had one person say no. Everybody else was a mix between yes or maybe. So the journals specifically and the language used is causing people to doubt their passions. And it's not shocking to me, but I think that it is very compelling. Very, very compelling. And going into that, the next question is, has the complex language of the paper ever made you feel alienated or isolated? So, again, that's playing into that imposter syndrome, inadequacy, underqualification. Um, we were split between no and maybe on here. So a little bit inconclusive with those answers. But overall, still an interesting reaction. Alienated and isolated, maybe I didn't choose the correct words for that. Um, I wanted to play more into that underqualification and that imposter syndrome. Um, I think what I was going for with the alienated and isolated was, does the complex language, maybe the inhibition of understanding ever made you feel like you were behind or maybe not as qualified as your classmates? Just like, man, it really seems like they understand what they're doing and I don't. So perhaps those weren't the correct choices for words that I could have done. Um, maybe I could have done a little bit more on the clarity of that, but moving right along. Question nine. So question nine, I wanted to get at if there were any barriers, perhaps beyond the subject's control, that could have led into the prevention of understanding. So I'm just going to read to you the different categories that I came up with. Um, first one was disabilities. There are a lot of people, I guess not, forgive me, not a lot of people, but there are some people who struggle with certain disabilities that can make it, um, significantly more difficult for them to understand these dense scientific materials. So that was an option. Um, the next section was racial or ethnicity disparities. Um, I specifically chose that category because, um, there is not a lot of diversity in science. We are getting better. I will say that we are getting better and we are getting better at um, providing an inclusive space. So encouraging people of different racial or ethnic backgrounds to joining the scientific community. Um, and I wanted to know if perhaps any of those issues or difficulties, that feeling of isolation or alienation, um, just based off of racial or ethnic disparities can impact the literacy of the subject. Next section was education access inequalities. This is a big one. Oh, excuse me. I have to sneeze. Oh, okay. It's fine. Sorry, guys. Um, so education access inequalities. There are some communities that maybe do not have the same amount or same quality of early education as others. Um, we have seen study after study talking about that. And I just wanted to know if perhaps that has led to, um, being able to understand these denser materials. Um, so socioeconomic inequalities was the next one. Um, having enough financial stability to be able to go out and maybe get some more training or, um, resources, use those resources. Um, next category was gender inequality. Gender inequality was sort of the same thing as the racial or ethnic inequalities that I mentioned earlier. It was put on there for the same reason. And so I have an other category of, and then please explain. And last one is lack of free resources. So, um, that being internet, library access, time constraints, expert help. So have any of those limited access to resources affected your understanding of the material? And looks like we had a couple of responses in that category. A few in the socioeconomic. One or two in the disability use. And a couple in the other section. So a bit of a spread that I wasn't expecting. However, it's still good data. Um, it's still great data, actually. Um, I think a lot of this survey was just trying to bring to light perhaps some of the strides of students and how we as a campus community could do better. Obviously we can see just looking at the raw survey details that some students are struggling. Some students are doubting their passions because they perhaps aren't receiving the help that they need on the scientific material. So that they feel prepared enough to go out into the world. So, and into the community. So, um, yeah. It's been super interesting. Um, that is all that I have. And this is actually the end of my senior thesis project. It was a great analyzation. And I am just so, so excited to be sharing this in a podcasting form. I wanted it to be accessible to more people. Um, and since the majority of the project was tailored towards scientific communication with the public, there are so many people that listen to podcasts. And I wanted to make it accessible and easy for the public to understand. To be able to hop on the sand wagon and, um, hear from some experts. And not just reading some dry papers. Maybe bring to light some of the struggles that students are going through. Um, I just want to briefly thank everybody for joining and listening. It has been a pleasure. And this is the end of my project. Maybe the podcast will continue in the future. Um, not, not so sure. But yeah, thank you so much for listening. Um, I'm your host, Sydney. And this has been Storytelling Science. From lab to listener.